Krampus
- You may wish to consult
Krampus (disambiguation)for other, similarly-named pages.
Krampus, (COMIC: Imaginary Enemies [+]Loading...["Imaginary Enemies (comic story)"]) or the Krampus, was a companion and servant of St Nicholas in Austrian and German folklore, representing the dark side of Christmas. (PROSE: Do You Believe in the Krampus? [+]Loading...["Do You Believe in the Krampus? (short story)"]) Existing perpetually in the shadow of "the Saint", Krampus engaged in various schemes to try and overpower Santa Claus and Christmas, (COMIC: Imaginary Enemies [+]Loading...["Imaginary Enemies (comic story)"], Holiday Special [+]Loading...["Holiday Special (comic story)"]) and was counted as a member of the Pantheon. As such, he was usually stuck outside reality, though he could walk the Earth around the winter solstice, "when the old beliefs are celebrated". (COMIC: Imaginary Enemies [+]Loading...["Imaginary Enemies (comic story)"])
Most accounts depicted Krampus as male, (COMIC: Imaginary Enemies [+]Loading...["Imaginary Enemies (comic story)"]) but during their battle with the Thirteenth Doctor, they were referred to as female, though their human persona, Mr Henderson, was male, (COMIC: Holiday Special [+]Loading...["Holiday Special (comic story)"]) much like the "Uncle Krampus" disguise the entity had used to trick Veronica Stackmore. (COMIC: Imaginary Enemies [+]Loading...["Imaginary Enemies (comic story)"])
Krampus had various agents and minions, including the goblins Otto, Ludwig and Siegfried (COMIC: Imaginary Enemies [+]Loading...["Imaginary Enemies (comic story)"]) as well as a swarm of smaller, more imp-like "minions of Krampus". (COMIC: Holiday Special [+]Loading...["Holiday Special (comic story)"]) Like fellow Pantheon member the Toymaker, (TV: The Giggle [+]Loading...["The Giggle (TV story)"]) they could make their lairs bigger on the inside, despite them not being Time Lord technology. (COMIC: Holiday Special [+]Loading...["Holiday Special (comic story)"])
Biography[[edit] | [edit source]]
In folklore[[edit] | [edit source]]
According to the Austrian Christian beliefs, the Krampus accompanied St Nicholas. While the latter rewarded good children, the Krampus punished bad children. One version claimed that the Krampus uses the famous list of good children that is checked twice. (AUDIO: Better Watch Out [+]Loading...["Better Watch Out (audio story)","Better Watch Out"]) Another version maintained that the Krampus had "his" own list of naughty children, written in blood. "He" stole the wickedest children by stuffing them into the basket on "his" back (PROSE: Do You Believe in the Krampus? [+]Loading...["Do You Believe in the Krampus? (short story)","Do You Believe in the Krampus?"]) and dragging them to hell. (AUDIO: Better Watch Out [+]Loading...["Better Watch Out (audio story)","Better Watch Out"])
Every 5 December, on the eve of St Nicholas's Day, Salzburg organised a Krampus run, or Krampuslauf in German. During it young men dressed in furs, wore wooden masks with goat's horns and carried chains and cowbells to scare passers-by. (PROSE: Do You Believe in the Krampus? [+]Loading...["Do You Believe in the Krampus? (short story)","Do You Believe in the Krampus?"]) They whipped the legs of naughty boys with birch branches. (AUDIO: Better Watch Out [+]Loading...["Better Watch Out (audio story)","Better Watch Out"])
Children in schools prepared for the event by making posters to hang out outside their schools. It was also a custom both in Austria (PROSE: Do You Believe in the Krampus? [+]Loading...["Do You Believe in the Krampus? (short story)","Do You Believe in the Krampus?"]) and Germany (COMIC: Relative Dimensions [+]Loading...["Relative Dimensions (comic story)","Relative Dimensions"]) to send Krampus postcards. (PROSE: Do You Believe in the Krampus? [+]Loading...["Do You Believe in the Krampus? (short story)","Do You Believe in the Krampus?"])
The Eighth Doctor did not believe that Krampus really existed, and conjectured that, like most horned demons in Earth folklore, the myth of the Krampus was based on some alien race that came into contact with humanity in its earliest days. (AUDIO: Better Watch Out [+]Loading...["Better Watch Out (audio story)","Better Watch Out"]) For instance, the Third Doctor once encountered a Dæmon in England. (TV: The Dæmons [+]Loading...["The Dæmons (TV story)","The Dæmons"])
Plaguing Amelia, Rory and Mels[[edit] | [edit source]]
Thanks to the crack in time in Amelia Pond's bedroom wall, the fabric of the walls of reality was weakened around Leadworth during her childhood. One Christmas, Krampus took advantage of this to contact Veronica Stackmore, the spoiled daughter of the Mayor, through a mirror. Posing as her jovial "Uncle Krampus", he tricked her into accepting the Link (actually a lump of coal) in the form of a beautiful doll, allowing him to fully enter her realm alongside his servants, the goblins Otto, Ludwig, Siegfried.
Describing himself as feeding on the chaos which resulted from disrupting history, Krampus intended to capture and kill Amelia, Rory Williams and Mels Zucker, disrupting their lives. However, the goblins failed to capture the children due to failing to account for Mels's superhuman strength, and, even after Krampus personally captured them and took them to the library where he'd set up camp, he was unable to kill them unless Veronica wished them to he "banished forever".
When at first she hesitated, he tried to persuade her to do so by showing her an image of Amy's Petrichor brand, showing Veronica that Amelia would one day become much more popular than her. However, Amelia managed to tun Veronica around by allowing her to see through the glamour which disguised the Link as a doll. Angered, she threw it back into the mirror as Krampus and his goons were forcibly dragged back into "whatever dirty little corner of existence they ha come from". (COMIC: Imaginary Enemies [+]Loading...["Imaginary Enemies (comic story)"])
Meeting the Thirteenth Doctor[[edit] | [edit source]]
Having reemerged in the conventional universe, Krampus set about enacting a highly ambitious plan that would destroy Christmas forever while also providing Krampus herself with enough psychic energy to sustain her for "a lifetime". Co-opting the aesthetics of Christmas, she adopted the identity of "Mr Henderson" and built a Christmas-village-like, dimensionally transcendental facility on a wintry planet, which she staffed with small, elf-like aliens forcibly taken from another planet.
There, thanks to a hypnotic field, the abductees were made to believe that they were volunteers working on creating a cold fusion device, when in fact, Krampus was directing them to build a "hybrid teleportation and energy collection device". Krampus's plan was to use it to summon a large number of her minions into the universe, then to send them across all of space to every household with children who celebrated Christmas; the love of the holiday would be "frightened out of them" and the device would gather the energy of their collective fear for Krampus's consumption.
Before preparations were complete, the Doctor's TARDIS landed by chance on the aliens' planet. Told about their people's plight by Friffle, the Thirteenth Doctor and her fam headed to Henderson's world to foil his plans, only for them to be sent away by the hypnotic field with false memories of some other adventure on Friffle's planets. However, each of the time-travellers had come away with a different false memories; a little while later, comparing stories, they realised something was amiss and returned to Friffle's planet, then to Henderson's world, now armed with devices to deflect hypnotic waves. They were captured by Henderson and throw into a jail cell, but escaped with the help of Baxter, one of Santa Claus's elves who had been sent to investigate Henderson's activities.
Sneaking into Krampus's office, they found her list of every Christmas-celebrating child, then witnessed Henderson shifting back into her true form, allowing them to figure out the entire scheme. While Yasmin Khan created a distraction by using the Thirteenth Doctor's sonic screwdriver to disrupt the hypnotic field and give all the workers and guards their own minds back, the Doctor rewired the unfinished transportation system to suck all of the minions back whence they came. Krampus declared herself beaten for now, but swore she'd get her revenge on the Doctor before willingly jumping into the portal to follow her army.(COMIC: Holiday Special [+]Loading...["Holiday Special (comic story)"])
Legacy[[edit] | [edit source]]
The Fifth Doctor and Vislor Turlough once tried to prevent an alien, who impersonated the Krampus, from eating children in Salzburg during a Krampus run. (PROSE: Do You Believe in the Krampus? [+]Loading...["Do You Believe in the Krampus? (short story)"])
The Eighth Doctor, Liv Chenka and Helen Sinclair encountered a gigantic version of a Krampus in Salzburg. It had been brought into existence by Artron in fulfilment of a wish of Maria Werner that the Krampus be real. (AUDIO: Fairytale of Salzburg [+]Loading...["Fairytale of Salzburg (audio story)"])
The Eleventh Doctor met a gaseous species that took on the appearance of Krampus. (COMIC: Red Christmas [+]Loading...["Red Christmas (comic story)"])
The Twelfth Doctor and Clara Oswald were once attacked by a Krampus from a German Krampus card made real by the Toymaker. (COMIC: Relative Dimensions [+]Loading...["Relative Dimensions (comic story)"])
Appearance[[edit] | [edit source]]
According to Austrian tradition, the Krampus of the Christmas myth was described as a humanoid figure with goat hooves and horns, covered in fur who had a demon-like face, (AUDIO: Better Watch Out [+]Loading...["Better Watch Out (audio story)","Better Watch Out"]) red eyes and long forked red tongue. He would have black chains hanging from its wrists, and on his back he would carry a basket. (PROSE: Do You Believe in the Krampus? [+]Loading...["Do You Believe in the Krampus? (short story)","Do You Believe in the Krampus?"]) The artificial Krampus created by Artron to fulfil Maria Werner's wish looked like the mythical Krampus but was as tall as the mountains. (AUDIO: Better Watch Out [+]Loading...["Better Watch Out (audio story)","Better Watch Out"])
Two separate account showed that the red-furred, unclothed, goat-like humanoid was indeed Krampus's true form, but that he was able to take on human glamours. (COMIC: Imaginary Enemies [+]Loading...["Imaginary Enemies (comic story)"], Holiday Special [+]Loading...["Holiday Special (comic story)"]) When breaking through in Leadworth, he posed as "Uncle Krampus", a jolly fat man with an Austrian accent who appeared as a colour-inverted mirror of Santa Claus, sporting a black beard and wearing a white coat with red trimming. (COMIC: Imaginary Enemies [+]Loading...["Imaginary Enemies (comic story)"]) As "Mr Henderson", Krampus appeared even closer to Santa Claus, though with a taller, more muscular build, and wearing a red business suit instead of the conventional wintry fare. (COMIC: Holiday Special [+]Loading...["Holiday Special (comic story)"])
Personality[[edit] | [edit source]]
Krampus was a deceitful being, skilled at slipping into alternative personas to further their plans. (COMIC: Imaginary Enemies [+]Loading...["Imaginary Enemies (comic story)","Imaginary Enemies"], Holiday Special [+]Loading...["Holiday Special (comic story)"]) However, their frustration could easily slip through from under the façade, with Krampus once being unable to refrain himself from calling Veronica Stackmore a "spoiled brat" as he lost patience with her. (COMIC: Imaginary Enemies [+]Loading...["Imaginary Enemies (comic story)"]) Motivated above all else by a consuming jealousy directed at Santa Claus, (COMIC: Imaginary Enemies [+]Loading...["Imaginary Enemies (comic story)"], Holiday Special [+]Loading...["Holiday Special (comic story)"]) Krampus also delighted in causing chaos for its own sake, (COMIC: Imaginary Enemies [+]Loading...["Imaginary Enemies (comic story)"]) yet liked to pretend that he was a force for justice who "punished the naughty ones". (COMIC: Imaginary Enemies [+]Loading...["Imaginary Enemies (comic story)"], Holiday Special [+]Loading...["Holiday Special (comic story)"]) This was only a self-serving lie, with Baxter confirming to Team TARDIS that Krampus was perfectly willing to feed on innocent children as well as ostensibly "guilty" ones if it came to that. Baxter also dismissively mentioned that Krampus liked to claim that they were a "vegetarian" due to only feeding on the spiritual energy of children's fear, and not their actual flesh, a position which Baxter obviously met with scorn. (COMIC: Holiday Special [+]Loading...["Holiday Special (comic story)"])
